Last edited: February 06, 2005

Obscenity: The New Invasion of Privacy?

Family Research Council, July 25, 2003

By Colin Stewart, Executive Vice President

In the brief time since the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, gay activists have used the case to push for same-sex marriage in several states across the nation. Now, a lawyer from Ohio known for defending the likes of porn-pusher Larry Flynt, has filed suit to have Ohio’s obscenity law struck down based on the Lawrence ruling. Citing the so-called “Due Process Right to Privacy,” which the Supreme Court invented 30 years ago to justify abortion and has now expanded to endorse the gay agenda, attorney H. Louis Sirkin is arguing that there is a constitutionally protected right to buy, sell and own obscenity. “Practically all choices made by consenting adults regarding their own sexual practices [are] a matter of personal liberty and thus beyond the reach of state control,” Sirkin is quoted as saying in The Washington Times. As absurd as his claims are, they exemplify the sort of problems Justice Antonin Scalia warned would follow the Court’s wrongheaded ruling in Lawrence. Though obscenity destroys families, fuels pedophiles and rapists, and though it enjoys no constitutional protection, the Court’s decision has called into question virtually all laws that would uphold public morality. Ohio state attorneys promise to vigorously defend their state’s obscenity laws. We certainly hope that the judges hearing this case will take the correct position that the Constitution is worth protecting and obscenity is worth destroying—not vice versa.

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